9 Answers
9

(var sp. 'flakey') Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric, crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of -- enough that you are tempted to try to use it -- but fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers dodgy or wonky.

If you want to know what lossage, dodgy, or wonky mean, you'll need to follow the links. Following wonky gives you more synonyms.

I used that word in my question. I suppose it works, but it just seems a bit vague to me.
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UrbycozJul 15 '11 at 13:26

2

I initially thought the same thing, but I think it depends on OP's situation. If his software works or doesn't work, e.g. a web server that sometimes fails to return a page, I'd say "flaky" or "unreliable". If his software seems to always be available but sometimes gives the wrong answer (e.g. a GPS), that's definitely "unreliable". If in his situation "unreliable" could mean that, I might steer away from that word for the case of "sometimes doesn't answer". Of course, I could be over-analyzing this. :-)
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Monica CellioJul 15 '11 at 14:32

+1 for fickle, a favorite word of mine. It looks like you are citing from a source, but you've not included it. If that's the case, please edit your answer to include the source (and a link, if there is one). If it's commonly used, our list of abbreviations may be helpful. Thanks!
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Kit Z. Fox♦Jul 16 '11 at 1:32

I've always thought occulting would be a good term, but it has not yet gathered enough fans to be recognized. Strictly, it refers to lights (usually in lighthouses) that are lit for longer than they are dark (flashing is the opposite), but it has a connotation of the black magic that we all know is really responsible for the bug.

If it keeps running, but occasionally does weird things, one possible word for that would be glitchy (although it would be a more common phrasing to say it has a glitch).

If instead the sporadic bug(s) causes the program to crash (where "crash" in this case means cease executing in an uncontrolled way), a more proper thing to say that the program itself is unstable.

A third possibility is that the bug causes program goes off into an infinite loop. In that case, neither of the above is quite right. There are a myriad of words for this. Probably the best understood would be to say the program locks up. For more similar terms, I generally suggest consulting FOLDOC.

However, you should realize that none of these terms really have precise meanings. The problem is that everyone uses software (and thus needs to use terms like this to describe system behavior), but few people are actual software engineers familiar with the common uses of the jargon.

But buggy can mean a lot more things than just unreliable/flakey. For example if you consistently can't print a report when it has an odd number of pages, then that's buggy. But it's not really unreliable/flakey. An application that just crashes twice per hour with no visible reason or pattern is unreliable/flakey.
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Joachim SauerJul 15 '11 at 12:35

Software vaults can easily seem intermittent. I've seen bugs depend on the behaviour of other users on the same server. To the end user that makes the code seem highly non-deterministic.
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Joachim SauerJul 15 '11 at 12:41

Yes, but it's only an impression of non-determinism. The CPU will execute the same instructions the same way each time unless something external affects it. The software's unreliable because of the conditions under which it's run. But this is all peripheral to the OP's question.
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paviumJul 15 '11 at 12:46

Physical components are also deterministic. The appearance of non-determinism in either physical components or software stems from an observing human's inability to account for all the relevant inputs.
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Karl BielefeldtJul 15 '11 at 16:25